In what could bring an ear-to-ear grin on DIY NAS/home-server builders, ASRock launched the industry's first mini-ITX motherboard with a total of eight SATA 6 Gb/s ports (of which one is eSATA 6 Gb/s). The new FM2A85X-ITX, as the name suggests, is a socket FM2 motherboard based on the AMD A85X chipset, in the mini-ITX form-factor. Everything on this board is just where you'd want it to be: the centrally-located APU socket is powered by a fairly strong 6-phase VRM, which along with ancillary phases, draws power from 24-pin ATX and 4-pin CPU power connectors.

The APU socket, which supports today's AMD A-series "Trinity" APUs, and likely tomorrow's A-series "Richland" APUs, is wired to two DDR3-DIMM slots supporting a maximum of 32 GB of dual-channel DDR3-1866 memory; and the lone expansion slot, a PCI-Express 2.0 x16. The AMD A85X FCH wires out seven internal SATA 6 Gb/s ports (with RAID 0/1/10 support), and an eSATA 6 Gb/s port. Display connectivity includes one each of dual-link DVI, D-Sub, and HDMI. The board features a total of four USB 3.0 ports (two on the rear panel, two by headers). Gigabit Ethernet, 8-channel HD audio, PS/2 keyboard, and a number of USB 2.0/1.1 ports make for the rest of the connectivity. The ASRock FM2A85X-ITX is expected to be priced around US $110.

After the last fiasco with ASRock FM2A75M-ITX I'm not so easy in trusting ASRock anymore. While I do like some of there products I still think about my burned 600$ PC when it went up in flames (literally) after 1 minute spent in BIOS. I really hoped that an extra heatsink with thermal glue would have helped but it didn't so it went kboom and burn my CPU water cooler and the fire went out with an epic splash on my motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU and fried my PSU also. Should have gone with MSI FM2-A75IA-E53 but I was to stubborn . That's the problem with not many products on the market, just 2 motherboards in ITX format for FM2, now 3 with this product. I'll just have to wait for ASUS and A10-6800K for my new PC.

After the last fiasco with ASRock FM2A75M-ITX I'm not so easy in trusting ASRock anymore. While I do like some of there products I still think about my burned 600$ PC when it went up in flames (literally) after 1 minute spent in BIOS. I really hoped that an extra heatsink with thermal glue would have helped but it didn't so it went kboom and burn my CPU water cooler and the fire went out with an epic splash on my motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU and fried my PSU also. Should have gone with MSI FM2-A75IA-E53 but I was to stubborn . That's the problem with not many products on the market, just 2 motherboards in ITX format for FM2, now 3 with this product. I'll just have to wait for ASUS and A10-6800K for my new PC.

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Its not ASRocks fault if you were OCing a CPU on a media style board that is suppose to be used at stock settings.

After the last fiasco with ASRock FM2A75M-ITX I'm not so easy in trusting ASRock anymore. While I do like some of there products I still think about my burned 600$ PC when it went up in flames (literally) after 1 minute spent in BIOS. I really hoped that an extra heatsink with thermal glue would have helped but it didn't so it went kboom and burn my CPU water cooler and the fire went out with an epic splash on my motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU and fried my PSU also. Should have gone with MSI FM2-A75IA-E53 but I was to stubborn . That's the problem with not many products on the market, just 2 motherboards in ITX format for FM2, now 3 with this product. I'll just have to wait for ASUS and A10-6800K for my new PC.

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If the motherboard did that, I'm pretty sure Asrock would replace all of the stuff you lost. Unless you were overclocking of course.

All board manufacturers are not perfect. MSI has had the same issues with there lower end boards like the one I have (785GTM-E45) and the same issue with weak mosfets caused failures twice now and if it blows again I will karate chop this motherboard and make sure it cannot be see by man ever again...

After the last fiasco with ASRock FM2A75M-ITX I'm not so easy in trusting ASRock anymore.

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There were times when a whole truck of Asrock motherboard arrived in a state where the cheap KZG caps just fell off from the boards when you removed them from the antistatic bag. It was all defective and Asrock put their name on it.
If you see things from that perspective, you could say that it's much better now than how it was 7-8 years ago, more to that, I have to admit that some boards from the Sandy Bridge generation were quite good and well made